Seventy-seven years later, on September 22, the Metropolitan Opera opened its 125th season with Renée Fleming performing scenes from Manon, Capriccio, and La Traviata. But rather than listening to a tinny, low-tech radio relay, the children and grandchildren of those 1931 radio listeners climbed into their cars and drove to the local multiplex to hear and see the celebrated soprano in state-of-the-art high-definition video and audio on the big screen.

 

Now in its third season, the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcast initiative, spearheaded by General Manager Peter Gelb, has succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations—even Gelb’s. In the 2007-08 season, the Live in HD program reached over 920,000 people, more thanattended Met performances at Lincoln Center. “We’re basically doubling our audience,” said Gelb recently. “It’s a win-win for opera.”

 

But ultimately it is a tool designed to “make people want to come to the Met,” says Gelb. “It’s like watching baseball games on television or on big-screen TVs in sports bars. It only makes the audience want to experience the real thing—in a stadium or in the theater.”

 

Following the Fleming opening-night gala—the 2008-09 season will offer ten broadcasts, including five starry new productions: John Adams’s Doctor Atomic in its Met premiere, La Damnation de Faust with Marcello Giordani and Susan Graham, Thaïs starring Fleming, La Rondine with Angela Gheorghiu and Roberto Alagna, and La Sonnambula with Natalie Dessay and Juan Diego Florez.

 

The balance of performances isn’t steam heat either, including Karita Mattila in Salome, Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazón in Lucia di Lammermoor, and Stephanie Blythe and Daniella de Niese in Orfeo ed Euridice.

 

Audience erosion has been stemmed and reversed, with attendance at the Met increasing 12 percent since Gelb took over in 2006, an increase he attributes in large part to the HD broadcasts. And in the current economically straitened times for the arts, it’s a phenomenon that has not gone unnoticed.

 

Several major domestic and international houses have jumped on the HD bandwagon, including La Scala, the Salzburg Festival, and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Plácido Domingo has stated he would like to do HD in both Washington and L.A. In New York, Symphony Space is launching its second season of HD relays with such European destinations as La Scala,   Glyndebourne, Teatro Le Fenice, and Maggio Musicale Fiorentino.

 

“There’s nothing like the thrill of a live performance,” enthuses Elizabeth Bell, head of corporate

communications at the Royal Opera House, which will also break Terpsichorean ground this season with the first live HD dance broadcast of the Royal Ballet’s Ondine in June. “For those people who are unable to be sitting in the auditorium itself, the new technologies available to us through digital cinema . . . opens up a whole new world of opportunities. It allows so many more people to enjoy our work.”

 

The technological advances in the last three-quarter-century are seismic, from vacuum-tube radio to the startling quality of high-definition video and audio in state-of-the-art digital stereo sound. But the principle and the driving engine are the same. Just as the Metropolitan Opera ushered in a new era for Depression-era America, so too in the 21st century the storied company is blazing a path of technological innovation and creative marketing that is reinvigorating the centuries-old art form at a time when its popularity seemed to be waning.

 

The expansion of “The Met: Live in HD” to ten performances this year and more international venues reflects the project’s success. “We have increased the capacity considerably,” says Gelb, “by adding more theaters in the U.S. and Canada and in additional countries.” The 2008-09 broadcasts will reach 445 theaters across the U.S. and grow to 28 countries this season, adding Argentina, Costa Rica, Finland, Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, New Zealand, and Mexico, where the performances will be shown in Mexico City’s Brobdingnagian Auditorio Nacional.

 

Gelb has always maintained that audience building for the Met at its New York home has been the principal motivation. And while it’s difficult to quantify whether the million-plus people that the HD broadcasts have reached outside of Gotham has translated into people actually traveling to New York to attend a real-time Met performance, there is measurable positive reinforcement for all opera companies. A survey the Met did in conjunction with Opera America found that a majority of people queried who had not been to a live opera in recent years said, after viewing a Met HD broadcast, that they now would want to attend a live opera performance in the flesh.

 

Not to say there haven’t been obstacles and occasional bumps in the road. At a Met relay the present writer attended last season in Miami Beach, the HD quality of Roméo et Juliette was so dark and muddy, one could barely distinguish Roberto Alagna from Anna Netrebko.

 

“We’re subject to the end-user experience,” replies Gelb, “which is the technical quality and maintenance of the local projector. We have no control over that, the same way a Hollywood distributor has no control over how a movie looks at a venue. We’ve had a number of isolated cases of glitches but for most audiences it’s a very pleasurable one.”

 

He added that the technical challenges, rather than becoming easier have grown much more complicated since the first season. “We’re now using multiple satellites and multiple languages subtitles. It’s a technological feat, I can tell you.”

 

The vast commercial and PR success apart, Gelb emphasizes that audience development at the Met’s New York base has remained the guiding motivation for the initiative. “That was always the main reason behind it,” says Gelb. “It’s the reason why members of the Metropolitan Opera company and artistic community—particularly the singers and directors—have been very flexiblein terms of fees in order to see this succeed. They saw that this was going to be an essential tool to increase the profile of opera and gain back the audiences that we have been losing.”

 

And while Gelb does not credit The Met: Live in HD alone for stemming and turning around the erosion of subscribers, he believes it has “certainly been a major component” and not just on north Broadway in New York. “I know for a fact that it has helped the Met increase its  attendance,” states Gelb, “and I believe it’s had a positive effect upon other companies peripherally—just because more people are talking about opera than they had been a coupleyears ago, largely because of this initiative. The fact that other companies here and abroad are trying to follow in our footsteps is an indication that they also felt HD broadcasts could be helpful to them.”

 

One of those companies is San Francisco Opera, but following in the wake of the Met’s quick supremacy has not proved an easy task. Last season San Francisco Opera broadcastfour productions. And while the company’s general director, David Gockley, promises the SFO will be back with more HD broadcasts in early 2009, he believes the company has to carve its own path in the brave new HD broadcast world. “We will definitely be out there in some form during ’08-09,” says Gockley. “But I think we need to step back, regroup, and try to figure out how we get a niche in the market given the dominance of the Met.”

 

SFO’s broadcasts differ from the Met in the fact that the performances are not live and involve post-production work. But Gockley isn’t convinced that the lack of live frisson was the major impact in SFO’s lack of box office, with just a 3,000 average audience per production at 120 theaters for San Francisco’s HD broadcasts (rising to 7,500, says Gockley, for Madama Butterfly).

 

A celebrated history like that of the Metropolitan Opera is tough to compete with. “I think the most powerful thing about the Met’s live broadcast is that it mirrors the radio broadcasts that have happened for 75 years,” says Gockley. “And therefore there’s been a national audience built around that live performance time on Saturday afternoon, carved out meticulously, painstakingly for decades.” Gockley believes that a case can be made for “post-produced” as well as live transmissions, and that he anticipated that SFO will continue to offer non-live broadcasts.

 

But he is candid about the reasons for the company’s lack of conspicuous success with its initial foray into HD broadcast. “I think we hurried to market,” he concedes. “And I think we were limited in the theaters we could book because of the Met’s exclusive arrangement with these three major chains that pretty much are in better locations.” His former home of Houston was a prime example. “In my old bailiwick, I was glad to see there was a multiplex carrying San FranciscoOpera,” says Gockley wryly. “But it was so far in the northwest of the city you had to go past 25 barbeque restaurants and 16 strip joints. These locations have nothing to do with the right demographic of potential opera audiences—the old and rich or the young, educated, and curious.”

 

Another issue was the lack of theater signage and indicators that the broadcasts were actually taking place in the venues listed. “Once you get them on line, the opera event is not listed. These exhibitors were not at all conversant in appealing to niche audiences.”

 

Gockley was satisfied with the artistic quality of SFO productions—and since they were taped,the company was able to circumvent the vagaries of live satellite transmission that has at times bedeviled the Met. Yet he found that even in its smaller market share, San Francisco Opera encountered considerable problems in theaters with the technical quality of the re-broadcast performances. “I got reports of a lot of issues with sound—not having to do with what we sent but with speakers being out. Or the video wasn’t properly related to the screen, subtitles were cut off or there were problems with the projector or projectionist.”

 

While the Met has for the most part concentrated on big stars in largely standard repertory, Gockley believes that San Francisco Opera can still elbow its way into a place at the HD table by providing offbeat works and unusual repertory. This season’s SFO world premiere of Stewart Wallace’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, based on the Amy Tan novel, about the lives and relationship between a Chinese-American woman in San Francisco and her aging mother, seems like a good bet. Also essential is “finding presenting organizations that have built-in sophisticated audiences in good demographic locations that go way beyond the traditional cinema or multiplex.”

 

“We were headed that way, but I have to say the Met trumped everybody by getting into the cinemas as quickly as they did and in the way that they did,” adds Gockley. “I think Peter, with his media background with Sony and some of the colleagues he worked with, saw the light before any of the rest of us did.”

 

In Europe, several leading opera houses are hoping to avoid San Francisco’s fate last season. A company called Emerging Pictures joined the fray last year, representing HD transmissions from La Scala. This season they are adding Teatro Comunale in Bologna, Teatro Regio in Parma, Salzburg, Glyndebourne, and the Bolshoi Theater to an impressive Euro-centric roster that includes Florence’s Maggio Musicale and Teatro la Fenice in Venice, as well as La Scala. Company President Giovanni Cozzi says he has concentrated not on competing with the Met’s vast multiplex dominance but on targeting select smaller cultural venues—150 worldwide for the Scala broadcasts. Because of the time difference, the European broadcasts are not transmitted live.

 

“Our operas are showing mostly in arts cinemas, performing- art centers, such as Symphony Space in New York, even museums that have a film program,” says Cozzi. “What we do is work with a lot of cultural centers, independent cinemas, and art houses. We needed to partner with venues that were active in marketing to people who were interested in something more than was

being offered at the local multiplex.”

 

Working directly with the arts organizations showing the broadcasts, says Cozzi, requires a kind of “guerrilla” marketing tailored to the venues. That pays off, he says, in attracting audiences that are more receptive to opera than your local cinema crowd attending the latest Hollywood blockbuster. “We have audiences that already have an interest in something, and they know what the operas are about,” says Cozzi. “They’re the same people that are going to independent and international films and documentaries. So we have people that fit the same profile as those that would be interested in classical music and culture.”

 

It seems unlikely that the Metropolitan Opera’s HD broadcasts will be seriously challenged in the near future, for they are only the largest and most visible part of the company’s audience development initiatives across the board. As Peter Gelb is quick to point out, there has also been an increase in educational public programs, including more open rehearsals and family offerings—like the abridged English-language Magic Flute or Hänsel und Gretel. Gelb has also lured film directors to stage Met productions, like the late Anthony Minghella’s acclaimed Madama Butterfly, and made the vast recorded archives of Met performances available on the Met’s channel on Sirius Radio. “That has really cemented the relationship between the Met and opera audiences,” says Gelb of the Sirius channel. “An opera lover can tune into his digital radio and have four live performances every week during the season plus all the archive performances we have. It’s a rich source of entertainment.”

 

As the former exec in charge of PBS’s Great Performances, he is especially proud of the Met’s return to television last season and that all 11 broadcasts will air in 2008-09. The Met has also initiated a pilot educational program in New York City in which teachers and students at public schools in each of New York’s five boroughs are invited to Met performances, with a preparatory curriculum provided. This year the program has expanded to 18 school districts across the U.S.

 

But, is there perhaps a chance that the vast success of The Met: Live in HD could somehow lead to audiences growing so used to intimate close-ups, backstage POV, majestic dolly shots, dressing-room interviews, and buttered popcorn at intermission that they will wind up forsakinglive opera performances and be content with the HD experience at the local multiplex? “I don’t think so,” says Gelb. “It’s like watching Monday Night Football. You’re getting extra information and commentary, but there is still no replacement for the visceral thrill, excitement, and sound of being in the actual opera house.”

 

In particular, Gelb believes it is the energy and highwire tension of an opera performance taking place live that has made the performances such a hit with audiences around the world—even with the inevitable compromises. “We’ve never had a transmission that was perfect,” says Gelb. “You can always eliminate a bad note or a shaky camera shot, but there’s no amount of postproduction work that can replace a proscenium performance that is really live.

 

“It’s about the true impression that’s being conveyed rather than something that has been made surgically perfect. These are not movies. These are live events on a giant screen, which is an appropriate forum for the larger-than-life art form that is opera.”

 

Writer and critic Lawrence A. Johnson covers local and national classical music on the Web site, South Florida Classical Review.com. A regular contributor to Gramophone and Opera, he served as classical music critic for the Miami Herald and South Florida Sun-Sentinel and has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune.